I'm working with a great custom action that allows me to select an area and have it automatically trace back from the previous instance.
e.g I freehand select around the feet of a character that i can see from the previous instance using the lightbox and they are copied to my current frame.
It essentially cuts out selecting with the custom brush and stamp in place, except it also removes lines not on the previous instance.
I hope that's all clear.

I would very much like a similar tool that allows you to select an area of lightbox and have the ghost image become the drawing on the current instance.
e.g I could select any instance before or after my current frame, rotate and scale it, then have it stamped on the current frame.

TVPaint is a great digital take on tradition paper animation and this 'place and trace' feature is something a huge amount of animators, especially clean up artists would die for.

I know we can sort of do this already with the custom brush and stamp in place but in theory the tool above would have no quality loss from modifying a drawing/custom brush and be much more intuitive and faster.

You can use a custom brush maybe you copy the area of the frame you want, you use the right shortcuts to resize/rotate it and then you place it by hand on the frame you want.

It's impossible to create an image from the light table. But we could imagine using the referenced frame number of the light table to copy the image (non transformed) to a custom brush.

Last edited by NathanOtano on 18 Apr 2016, 20:15, edited 1 time in total.

Storyboard, animation and design work : http://nathanotano.tumblr.com/
As I'm highly interested in animation workflows, I'm open to scripting new TVP functions for individuals and studios. Please don't hesitate to contact me!

6eoff wrote:
I know we can sort of do this already with the custom brush and stamp in place but in theory the tool above would have no quality loss from modifying a drawing/custom brush and be much more intuitive and faster.

You can setup keys to copy a previous frame to the spare buffer, then use a "Merge Mode" brush to simply paint from the image in the spare buffer onto the current frame? (you can use the light table image while merging to know what lines would be copied from the buffer.)

Once merged, you could use any of the transforms on the updated current frame.

Note that using the merge brush this way not only copies the lines from the spare buffer, it also copies non-line areas, erasing existing lines on the current frame.

I would just like to get away from 4+ actions currently required to achieve this common action that so many of us used on paper. It feels so close to being possible.

The added benefit of stamping what you see on the light table is there's no pixelation from rotation or blurriness. ( anything degraded from a pure drawing is unusable on my current production, we can sometimes get away with a sharpen fx for some inbetweens.)
At the moment, to get an acceptable quality for production, i have to place the light table and hand trace. The drawn pixels i want are right there, mocking me, making me fill them in slowly by hand.

I know this is not a simple feature to add. Getting the information from the light box's rotation/scaling/zoom seems to be the biggest issue.
I imagine any instances active on the light table are stamped at 100% regardless of their opacity setting (maybe unless they are at 0%). Just using one tool and one selection area.

Oh wow ! I needed to few minutes to get it, but it seems like a great idea !

However, I think we will deal with an issue : even if now the out-of-peg / shift-place & trace has an anti-aliasing option, if you rescale / rotate the previous drawing, then use your feature to "copy paste" the selection in the current frame, this drawing might be anti aliased too. And the more you will move, the more it will lose its line quality (the struggle is the same with transform tool or cutting tool).

Do you understand what I mean ? I know how cleaning up is both a precise and complex task, and most cleaning artists want to do it the faster they can. This idea is great, but I'm afraid that the side effect will bring a bigger frustration.

Getting the information from the light box's rotation/scaling/zoom seems to be the biggest issue.

I might be wrong, but I think it can be done in a script since 11.0.3
That said, it's still far from the tool you need.

(nb : to make sure that everyone understand the same and for later remembering/work, feel free to post an exemple image)

Yeah with all those ideas, it seems scriptable to me :
- You get the correct image regarding lightable settings
- You transform it regarding lighttable settings (on a new temporary layer for exemple)
- You put it on the spare buffer like sven suggested
- You select Merge mode with filed lasso tool

Or we could have a first script to :
- Go to the setted ligttable frame
- Set freehand cutbrush to copy
The user Copies the area needed then we launch a second script to :
- Go back to current frame
- Stamp in place the brush
- Transform it regarding lighttable settings

In fact, I would use this kind of script a lot.

Storyboard, animation and design work : http://nathanotano.tumblr.com/
As I'm highly interested in animation workflows, I'm open to scripting new TVP functions for individuals and studios. Please don't hesitate to contact me!

Storyboard, animation and design work : http://nathanotano.tumblr.com/
As I'm highly interested in animation workflows, I'm open to scripting new TVP functions for individuals and studios. Please don't hesitate to contact me!